Posts Tagged ‘Sinai’

It’s estimated that the direct and indirect economic cost to Israel for the 51 day Gaza war was in the area of $3 billion dollars. It’s broken up between military costs, and economic damage.

I only mention that number because of an interesting article I read in Makor Rishon this weekend.

Assaf Gibor interviewed some young men (in their 20s and 30s) in Gaza who wanted to leave. They want to move to Europe, to start new lives and families there, away from Gaza, Hamas and war.

One man gave broke down the costs. He needed $12,000 to make a new life.

$5000 goes to pay the tunnel smugglers to get him out of Gaza and into the Sinai. Another thousand more to get him from the Sinai to Alexandria in Egypt. And two thousand dollars more to pay off a former Syrian woman named Um-Salim who helps Syrians (and now also Gazans) sneak into Europe via boat.

The boat goes out every Thursday with 300 people on it.

Once the boat reaches Italy, and the passengers reach shore (whether by docking or swimming), they head over to the local Red Cross office, they then get sent to jail for a short period of time, and soon after that, they are set free to go look for work and life in Europe.

At $12,000 a person, you could smuggle a million Gazans into Europe, and it would be far cheaper than what the European Union is going to waste in rebuilding Gaza, just so Hamas can get it all destroyed, when they attack Israel again. And the EU wouldn’t even notice the minuscule spike in new immigrants.

You’d need a lot more boats, but you get the idea.

When at least 70% of Arabs want to leave the Land of Israel (including Gaza), relocation is a concept seriously worth exploring.

There are financial solutions that would bring real peace. Just no one wants to talk about them.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has refused an offer by a senior Egyptian official to resettle “Palestinian refugees” in the Sinai, according to a report in the Middle East Monitor on Monday.

According to Abbas, the plan was first proposed in 1956 by Egypt, and was just put back on the the table again, in an attempt to help resolve the Arab-Israel conflict.

The idea was that the PA would receive a 618 square mile area adjacent to Gaza (the Gaza strip is 139 square miles) to resettle Arabs who claim refugee status. This would finally resolve the entire Palestinian refugee issue.

Abbas made it clear that he only wants to resettle refugees into Israel.

According to the report, Abbas proudly told the Fatah committee on Sunday that he refused the generous Egyptian offer to end the refugee problem.

Abbas said he refused the offer to settle them in the almost empty Sinai, as the plan “is absolutely unacceptable and the Palestinians will not accept it”.

Abbas clearly prefers to instead take money from the EU and the US to perpetuate the conflict.

Part of the PLO plan to eradicate Israel has always been founded on flooding Israel with “refugees”.

The refugees being referred to are primarily the 2nd and 3rd generation descendants of Arabs who were displaced from their homes when the Arab states attacked Israel in 1948.

At the time, the invading Arabs states told the Arabs in Israel to flee, so the invading armies could then wipe out the Jews unhindered. Others Arabs fled, thinking Israel would take revenge on them for what they did to the Jews over the years.

Most of these current “refugees”, and their parents, were born in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and other Arab countries.

UNRWA (remember them?) has perpetuated these people as refugees instead of rehabilitating them in their birth countries, where in fact many of their grandparents and great grandparents also originated from before migrating into Israel looking for work, once the Jews began to rebuild the country’s economy.

No other UN agency passes on refugee status to descendants like UNRWA does.

During the post 1948 period, an equivalent number of Jews were also forced to flee the Arab countries they had called home for thousands of years, long before Islam came on the scene.

Many of those Jews moved to Israel, where they were fully integrated as Israeli citizens. These Jewish refugees and their descendants have not yet received financial compensation from the Arab countries they were forced to flee from.

In the early 1970s, Israel attempted to build modern housing projects to improve the living conditions of Arab refugee through resettlement and economic development. This plan was rejected by the Arab as they claimed that socio-economic solutions cannot solve the Palestinian problem.

For the Palestinian Authority, the refugee issue is a timebomb to be used to extend the conflict until they win.

A rocket launched from the Sinai slammed into the Club Hotel in Eilat at 1:27am, Tuesday morning.

Two rockets were launched. One landed in an open area in the Shachmon neighborhood, the second landed on a car in the hotel’s parking lot, which is also next to the Beatles Pub.

Five people were lightly injured from shrapnel. Two additional people were treated for shock.

The article will be updated as more information becomes available.

Update: Two terrorist groups, Islamic Jijad and the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, which is part of Hamas’s military wing, both independently claimed credit for the attack. (Maybe they should fight it out among themselves, and leave us out of it).

In Syria and Iraq, the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) is now kidnapping boys as young as 10 years old to “recruit” them for a Shari’a (Islamic law) army whose ultimate goal is to “liberate” Jerusalem.

Some of the boys are joining up voluntarily, according to a report posted on the RT website. But many more are being conscripted against their will, and forced to fight in a jihad (Islamist holy war) they barely understand.

The two terrorists killed last Friday in Gaza in a surgical air strike by Israeli fighter pilots were both members of ISIS who had infiltrated the region. The terrorist group has begun to make its way towards Israel via the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and Hamas-ruled Gaza. It has already seized control of the sole border crossing between Jordan and Iraq — a victory that prompted the United States to send troops overseas to “advise” officials in the Iraqi army, and quietly assist its ally, Jordan.

The report in RT quoted The Daily Beast, which described the youngest known ISIS fighter, 10-year-old ‘Abdullah,’ fighting with the group in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The report described the young boy – who in this case joined up voluntarily, following his father and brother — as being masked and toting a heavy machine gun that was “about as big as him.”

But equally disturbing was the declaration by a gunman with the boy who told the news outlet, “We believe they will conquer all of Iraq and Persia and that they will liberate Jerusalem.

“They have a dream and their dream is to establish an Islamic state.”

Children in the ISIS bases undergo a 25-day course in which they are taught an extremist form of Islam and Shari’a law in daily classes, as well as the principles of jihad ideology. In addition, they are given field and combat training and are taught to use weapons, ITV reported.

The United Nations has apparently confirmed at least some of the above, noting in its annual report published in May, “children fighting in Syria with ISIS are reportedly paid like adults (35,000 Syrian pounds, approx. $200) and undergo both weapons and jihadist indoctrination training.”

Some of the children are subsequently sent on suicide bombing missions, according to a report published on June 24 by the Human Rights Watch organization.

The ISIS force currently fighting in Iraq is comprised of some 7,000 to 10,000 guerrillas.

The Egyptian Army claims that 15 ISIS operative infiltrated into the Sinai over the weekend, but were captured.

Egypt has also claimed that ISIS terrorists have infiltrated into the Sinai from Gaza via the tunnels.

In an unrelated attack, four Egyptian policemen were killed in clashes with Jihadists in northern Sinai, on Saturday.

The Hamas terror organization is denying that ISIS is active in Gaza, despite ISIS flags being waved at the Gaza funeral of the two rocket terrorist killed in a targeted strike on Friday. The two terrorists were members of Al-Nasser Salah Al-Din Brigades, and the flags appear to link the organizations together.

Gaza’s Ministry of the Interior spokesman Iyad Al-Bezem said the only organizations [terrorists] active in Gaza are Palestinian organizations [terrorists] and not ISIS, according to an NRG report.

When terrorists are killed, their compatriots use that opportunity to wave the organization’s flags at the funeral to show which organization’s members were martyred fighting Israel.

The presence of ISIS in Gaza puts pressure on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which until now were the leading terrorist organizations active in Gaza, after kicking out Fatah.

Security officials have issued a warning of an imminent terror attack in the Sinai Peninsula in northern Egypt, and Germany has advised its citizens to flee the area.

Intelligence agents in Egypt reportedly tapped phone conversations between a Sinai terrorist group and Palestinian Authority Palestinian terrorists outside of Egypt, who instructed the group how to carry out an attack.

The warning from Germany, whose citizens make up one of the largest groups of tourists in the Sinai and Red Sea resort, comes one week after a bus bombing near Tuba, in which three tourists and their driver were killed.

Earlier this week, terrorists in Sinai attacked the natural gas pipeline to Jordan for the fifth time this year, detonating a bomb.